


we have not touched the stars

by intimatopia



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Space, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Gen, Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Slash, Suicide Attempt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:55:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28697313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimatopia/pseuds/intimatopia
Summary: “I’m sure he’d rather die up there than return, but it’d look bad on our record.”“Can’t you just reassign him?”“He’s been doing solo missions for most of his career, that kind of thing’s bound to fuck you up. And he’s the best of the best. We’ll need him.”
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira
Comments: 35
Kudos: 118
Collections: Marigolds Discord Recs





	we have not touched the stars

**Author's Note:**

> i've been working on this fic since the end of november, and i've _never_ had 15k fight me so hard. despite that, this is now complete, and i hope you have a better time reading it than i did writing it.
> 
> a special shoutout to everyone who helped me: [cruellae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinkabelladk), for the alpha reading and encouragement and help with specific scenes; [summer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wondernoise), for reading this and generally being there; [v](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drowns), who isn't even into p5 but has listened to so much nonsense about akechi; [moki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonvapour), for the quick and thorough beta work, and [worms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helicoidcyme), whose valuable thoughts about space and lighthouses are knit into the premise of this fic <3
> 
> **warnings** [mild spoilers]: suicide, physical assault, nonconsensual body modification, child abuse, gaslighting, wars (and the way people die in wars and other people survive), unhealthy coping mechanisms, sex as self-harm, recreational drug use/drinking, and akechi's terrible and deteriorating mental state. 
> 
> needless to say, the moral and ethical conclusions reached by characters in this fic don't reflect my own.
> 
> if you like this fic, please consider leaving a comment or talking to me on my [tumblr](https://ciaran.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/_intimatopia)  
> 

> _“We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back—”_

Richard Siken

* * *

 **Location** : 9729.8731.3542 [Bourne]  
 **Astronaut in Charge** : Goro Akechi [Specialization: Astrogeology]  
 **Time Spent** : 812 Earth Days.  
 **Mission** : Retrieval.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 02.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Akechi sighed. In the cold air of outpost Bourne, his breath crystallized and dissipated.

There was little of note on Bourne. A small cold sun 4.834 billion kilometres away lit up the starboard. It was an asteroid, actually, dragged into a stabler orbit and refurbished for the Federation’s purposes. Most of the outpost lay underground, to provide protection from the constant storm outside.

The storm hadn’t damaged the hull. The hull had been damaged when Akechi got here, and it would never be fixed.

In his first months of his self-imposed exile on Bourne, Akechi had nearly managed to fix the hull. And then he’d fallen ill, six weeks of a wheezing space cough that still lingered as a tightness in his chest and a faint discomfort when he went up to the landing pad without sufficient gear.

Bourne had an oxygen atmosphere, though it was thin. The gravity that held the atmosphere to the ground also attracted silicon dust from the constant volcanic activity that defined the largest planet that orbited Bourne’s sun. Selous was uncomfortably close to Bourne; their orbits intersected at two points, and every five hundred years or so they’d graze close enough to affect Bourne’s fragile geology.

That wasn’t for another fifty years, though. 

In the meantime he mapped data from the constant space storm that swirled around Bourne’s sun, and dug up potatoes and planted more potatoes, and daydreamed about the emptiness of space.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 03.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

* * *

14:40 Selous Time; 03.7.5873

> (1) Message from Ground Control.

Akechi ignored it. Ground control never had anything useful to say. _Do you want to come back?_ No, he didn’t. _Do you need supplies?_ He had enough potatoes to stave off a national famine. _Do you need more personnel?_ Fuck, no. He’d come here to get _away_ from personnel.

He kept doing the sudoku. This one had sixteen boxes in each row. They took up a couple hours every morning, and he liked having a routine.

Numbers in the morning, outpost maintenance in the afternoon, reading at night. As much as Bourne could be said to have any of those. His local time was set to Selous, which made his days three hours longer than Earth days.

Earth days were an overrated form of timekeeping. Most people just stuck to them out of habit. So much more sensible to have ten hour nights and eleven hour days—precisely synced to the human circadian rhythm without the influence of their home planet.

Of course, Akechi was as tediously sentimental as the rest of them, and he loved Selous and it’s gorgeous, inconvenient volcanos enough to live by them.

Outside, the wind howled.

* * *

It was night by the time he remembered the message. 

> [9 hours old] _After much deliberation between the Federation and the Alliance, Bourne has been determined irrelevant to operations. It will be shut down as soon as possible._ _A pilot is being sent to retrieve personnel on board the outpost. He should arrive by 8.7.5873.  
> _
> 
> _Personnel on board are requested to initiate the shutdown protocols._

Akechi hands felt hot with anger.

Bourne was cold, and no number of layers could really insulate him from the icy loneliness of space. Akechi had grown fond of it. Cold meant covering up, meant no one could find his skin, meant no one could touch him. Even the vast, hungry indifference of space wasn’t a dent in that comfort—added to it, if anything; space was eons and lightyears between him and people.

Even when he thought the cold would kill him, it was preferable to other humans. What had people ever given him?

Except— 

He’d rather die than leave Bourne.

And now they were going to take him away from Bourne. Not even to give it to someone else, but shut it down.

Maybe he deserved this for thinking he could run from the world forever. But he’d _done_ his fighting. He’d fought for years and years and it hadn’t made a whit of difference in the end, so he’d run as far as he could. 

The moment he was back, he’d be fighting again.

Did he even remember how to fight?

> _Bourne is far from the center of the known universe, but it’s not ‘irrelevant.’ My work with the astrogeology of Selous has been invaluable to terraforming efforts in no less than 16 star systems, and the work of my predecessors has been even more formative. No doubt further discoveries are around the corner—if only I have the time to make them. This shutdown is sudden, unlawful, and_

Akechi bit his lip and backspaced all of it.

It took four tries to get something he was happy with. He could hardly remember the cadences of formal speech. It took time for the ancient ansible that powered communications in Bourne to download transcripts of his old interviews so he could scan it for a reminder of how he’d once persuaded half the Federation to support a cause he hated.

The reply came back nearly at once.

> _Bourne was marked for shutdown thirty years ago. It was kept alive out of hope that it would be useful someday, and while it has provided service to the Federation it has not carried out the purpose envisioned for it. Maintaining it is a drain on the Federation’s resources and a waste of its astronauts._
> 
> _This decision is not up for contest. Please do not try again._

Akechi put his head in his hands, and then raised it again. The sensation of skin against skin was uncomfortable, even when it was his own.

‘The purpose envisioned for Bourne’ had been war. In the early days, it had always been war. First with Earth, then with the Alliance, then with the Shadow Armies. Every child of the Federation grew up dreaming of war. Glory. All that good stuff.

Akechi, too, had once dreamed of glory. Now he had nightmares about it.

He had five days left. Not enough to grieve, but enough to remind himself of everything he was about to lose.

That night he dragged a sleeping bag and a tent out and slept on the landing pad, in the fierce unbroken darkness of the port side of Bourne. His lungs ached, and his mouth was dry all night, and every time he blinked his eyes felt gritty with dust.

He’d never felt safer.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 04.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Today’s sudoku puzzle had an error. Akechi had worked around it, but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. G-13 could’ve been either 9 or 11. There was already a 9 in row G, and there was already an 11 in column 13. Who the fuck was being paid to make these? They were supposed to be _difficult,_ not riddled with errors.

Irate, he copied the puzzle onto a fresh problem board. Let his eyes slip out of focus, taking the numbers in without reading them. He’d strategized for wars with this trick, once.

The requisite knowledge was there. He didn’t have to reach for it.

A-14, he thought. It should’ve been a 7 instead of a 4. The solution unfurled across the board. With a free 4 in column 14, he could shift the 15 next to it in, unlocking another square below…

And there he had it. Not the most elegant solution, but the board wasn’t designed well enough for elegant solutions. Despite his best efforts, the diagonals didn’t clean up. The mathematics of 4x4 sudokus were gorgeous. A damned shame, really, that his chosen newspaper had no idea how to make these boards as twisted as they could be.

He could’ve knocked up a generator for them himself in half an hour, and in another couple hours biased it towards solutions he could appreciate for their grace.

If he’d been less of a creature of habit, he’d have at least switched his allegiance to a different newspaper. But his mother had worked for the _Alliant Herald_ until she’d died, and he couldn’t help but hold onto these puzzles.

He closed out of the screen on his tablet without reading the news. 

Today he’d clean out the archives, choosing what to discard and what to take with back to the base. He had 70 years of samples to sort through.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 05.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Akechi startled.

The system scanner notification was the loudest one his tablet received. He scrambled for it, wincing at the crick in his neck and the way his entire lower back felt bruised. That was what he got for falling asleep sitting up against a pile of rocks.

At some point he’d automated the system scan. The alarm in the bedroom went off about two hours before it, so he was usually in the control room by the time the scan completed.

He thumbed the notification off and leaned forward to rest his head against his knees.

Half the archives done. The computer systems could be operated remotely, so he didn’t have to worry about the physical condition of the outpost until such time that the sensors embedded in its architecture failed.

Bourne had been built in the earliest stages of smart architecture. Now, a ship could repair itself as long as it had sufficient juice and a convenient dock. Bourne’s technicians had done the best they could, but only the sensor systems remained.

The sensor systems were pretty good, even if Akechi constantly had to fix burnt wires and patch up the code. He’d planned to overhaul the code entirely later this year, once the storm subsided.

Now…now.

Now he had the rest of the archives to go through.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 06.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Where had the time gone? He did two crosswords that morning, and skipped lunch to walk all across the station. It didn’t take more than an hour to inspect every room. He wished it had taken longer.

19:45 Selous Time; 06.7.5873

> _I decided it might be best to record the details of my findings. My memory’s never failed me before, but being earthside can have unexpected side effects._
> 
>   * __There are gaps in the archives — two major ones and then some minor ones. Undoubtedly the major gaps are due to the lousy deployment schedules for astronauts assigned to Bourne. The minor ones were probably illnesses.__
> 

>   * _The potatoes are thriving. Six months ago I began experimenting with adding gravel from Bourne’s surface to one of the farming rooms. It was a rousing success. Bourne’s native flora is sparse, but it could easily be terraformed by the strategic placement of some ferns. Astrogeologists would frown on such wanton interference, but it’s hardly the greatest crime I’ve ever committed._
> 

>   * _I don’t have ferns. These potatoes could be transplanted outside, though they wouldn’t survive the storm. So much for rogue terraforming._
> 

>   * _I hope to return someday._
> 


Bitter hopelessness swelled in his throat, because he never _would_ return. His hands tightened on the tablet.

He slept on the landing pad again that night.

* * *

Akechi had never let Bourne run down, so there was precious little to do. He woke up early and walked through the dim station, flipping switches off.

He sat down for breakfast at 8 a.m. on the dot, and thought about what he had left undone.

Some of the astrogeologists on Bourne had had their own spacecrafts, and had made trips to Selous to collect data. The last of those had been a few hundred years ago, now, before Selous’s surface had grown completely unnavigable due to the volcanic ash in the atmosphere.

There was a spot on it, though, that Akechi had spotted from the telescope chamber rarely visited. He didn’t want to see stars. But Selous was beautiful.

He’d had idle dreams of requisitioning a craft to try to get to that spot. To fly over it, at least.

And the potatoes. They’d keep growing. The rooms he’d converted to farm them had their own water cycles. Probably they’d mutate into something else by the time someone else came to Bourne.

Someone else…

Not him. They’d _never_ let him return.

* * *

The officer he’d asked for the assignment to Bourne had squinted at him.

_“Are you sure? You just did one long solo mission.”_

_“I’m sure. You can view my psych profiles if you’re worried—”_

_“Psych profiles aren’t everything, even if yours are perfect. Especially if they’re perfect.” A sharp look, like she knew Akechi could lie to the machines. “Why do you want this?”_

_“Peer reviews say I’m difficult and annoying to work with, and to be quite frank I feel the same about the rest of them. I’d rather work alone.”_

_Another sharp look. “I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. But after you come back earthside, Akechi, you’re not doing another solo mission. For the rest of your life. I don’t care how annoying you find the rest of us regular people, being alone for that long isn’t good for you.”_

_“Understood.” Akechi had smiled, directing his muscles to display pleasant acceptance. “I’ll try not to come back earthside.”_

* * *

So much for that. Foolish to think they’d let him have a choice.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 07.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

It had taken him a long time to understand that some people were just born to be lonely. They’d always existed. Poets, alchemists, lighthouse keepers.

Goro Akechi.

Once he’d convinced himself it was possible for him to be loved. And he _had_ been loved. He’d been loved as no one before or since, and hated in equal measure. But he hadn’t been loved in a way he could stomach, and he hadn’t been hated in a way that understood how rotten he truly was.

He _liked_ being alone. He wished he wasn’t, until he was around people. Then he remembered why he could never get along with them, or they with him, unless he cut himself down to size.

And he was tired of cutting himself down. He always failed, sooner or later.

Solitude had been a good decision.

(It had its side effects, as everything did. Sometimes he forgot to eat for days at a time. Sometimes he didn’t remember the color of his eyes. Sometimes he was so desperate for the touch of another person that he didn’t remember why he’d come here in the first place.

But those were the bad days. On the good days he remembered his alarms and his routines and he knew his eyes were red and he remembered how many people had touched him only to hurt him and was fiercely, painfully glad he was as far from them as humanly possible.)

He went through the motions of a normal day with mechanical precision. He knew where everything was, and what he had to do with it, and he did it.

It was over all too quickly.

He went to bed.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 08.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Akechi slept on.

* * *

11:00 Selous Time; 08.7.5873

> (1) Message from Ground Control.
> 
> _The spacecraft Arsene will dock at 5405 FGH. The pilot’s name is Akira Kurusu. Please make sure all affairs are in order. SC Arsene will carry out due maintenance, and takeoff is scheduled for 10.7.5873. Confirm message reception._

11:05 Selous Time; 08.7.5873

> _Message received._

* * *

5405 FGH translated to 13:10 Selous Time. Akechi’s lungs burned as he showered. The prospect of seeing another person was—horrifying. He couldn’t convince his heart to slow down. He hurried into his clothes, every inch of skin covered up so he wouldn’t give in to the temptation to scratch himself the way he had as a child.

He wandered the station like a ghost. He did that day’s sudoku in the archives, and then spent half an hour watering potatoes.

The ship was visible in the sky when he went out. SC Arsene was an elegant silver and red thing, like a triangular bullet.

It landed on the ancient pad with impressive ease, just the faint sizzle of overheated motors meeting cold smooth rock. The doors hissed open. Akechi walked slowly, painfully, towards them.

The pilot hopped the five feet between the hatch and the ground. He landed in a crouch and straightened up, grinning.

“Akira,” Akechi said experimentally. His voice came out scratchy and disused.

Of course it did. He hadn’t used it in 850 days.

“That’s me,” Akira said, smile fading. “Uh, I gotta do maintenance on him—” He jerked his shoulder back towards the ship.

People were so…so _much._ Akira’s grey eyes were heavy, stormy, contained like Selous’s atmosphere was contained by its gravity. He moved a lot, even while standing still. He blinked and shrugged and reached into his pocket and pulled out…

A photograph?

“Can you sign this for me?” Akira asked. “I know this kid who’s a _huge_ fan of your work—”

“No,” Akechi said coldly, and headed back to the station.

* * *

 _His_ work? His work had been killing people. An _autograph_ , honestly.

* * *

Akira spent the entire day fixing the ship. Akechi spent the entire day sulking, and coding up a generator for 4x4 sudokus, complete with his favorite difficult twists.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 09.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…   
> _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Akira leaned over his shoulder to read the message. Akechi daydreamed about stabbing him in the stomach.

He didn’t. He had no knives right now, and that much blood would just make a mess.

“There’s a gap in your hull,” Akira said, like he’d been the one to discover it.

Akechi doubled over laughing.

He couldn’t help it. He laughed until he wheezed.

“Uh,” Akira said. “Care to let me in on the joke?”

“Do you want to see the gap?” Akechi asked, straightening again. What an embarrassing little fit. He couldn’t afford such lapses once he returned earthside. “It’s a bit of a walk.”

“Sure,” Akira said.

“Breakfast first.”

“Alright, but I’m cooking.”

* * *

“When you said a _bit of a walk,_ ” Akira yelled from a full thirty feet behind him. The wind screamed in the space between them. “I thought you meant like twenty minutes, not the _other side of the planet._ ”

“It’s five kilometres,” Akechi said. His throat and lungs burned in the sharp dust. “Keep up.”

“We could’ve taken Arsene,” Akira called up grumpily.

“What for? It’s five kilometres, and there’s no landing pad where we’re going.” He’d left his gloves at the base in his hurry, and he regretted it sorely now. The wind bit and tore at his hands and neck where his clothes didn’t cover him, snapping against the implants in the tips of his fingers.

Akira hesitated. “But a hull is…”

“Keep up,” Akechi repeated, grinning. The expression was pointed and unfamiliar to his muscles.

They got there eventually. Akechi caught the moment Akira caught it, because Akira froze.

 _SC Bourne_ had been magnificent, once. They didn’t make spacecrafts like this anymore—spacecrafts that could house entire biomes. Bourne had held at least three. Akechi had found the bones of a Parifel tiger, four species of birds, and flash-frozen fish in the archives stored with choice pieces of antique technology.

Now spacecrafts were smaller, lighter, sleeker.

It was easy to see why. Arsene could make the 4000 parsecs between Federal Earthside and Bourne in 11 days. SC Bourne could…crash into a small planet, and make an asteroid out of it.

Which was exactly what it had done, almost 800 years ago.

320 years ago, on a bet, an astrogeologist had checked if SC Bourne’s sensors were still working. They were, so they’d hooked the sensors of the destroyed spaceship up to the station named after it.

Subsequent storms had ruined more of the sensors, until only those in a small section of the hull remained.

But the carcass of the spacecraft was still a sight to behold. It jutted out of its own crater, black and copper in the thin light of the distant sun. Its jaggedly broken edges sliced into the pale and stormy sky, and its empty windows whistled with the constant wind. Technological debris lay piled by its side, casting forlorn shadows on the wasted ground.

“Holy fucking _shit,_ ” Akira said reverently.

Akechi slid his hands into his pockets.

* * *

“Everyone on base talks about you,” Akira said.

They were on Bourne the station, carrying samples from the archives into Arsene’s cargo lockers. Akira had traded his light pilot’s gear for bulkier clothes more suited to the cold. Akechi was still in a shirt and pants. The cold didn’t bother him so much.

Akechi picked up a marker and scrawled _volcanic rock (collected circa 5100)_ on a box. “I can’t imagine why,” he said blandly.

“Can’t you?” Akira asked. “You’re like—you’re a legend. A genius strategist. The guy who won us the Shadow War. The guy who saved us all _._ ”

“I think,” Akechi replied slowly. “Some people would call it a tragedy.”

“Why? Our—cadet class of sixty-five—professor thinks it’s a good thing that the Army was destroyed. That we’d just have gone to war with the Alliance after defeating the Shadows. No one wants more bloodshed, right?”

What could Akechi even _say_ to that? He wanted to scream, like there were ants crawling up his spine. He wanted to throw himself into a volcano.

But in the end there was no greater suffering than being called a hero.

“Why did you become a cadet?” Akechi said distantly. He began to sketch on the side of the box, slow lines. The shape of a destroyed city.

“I wanted to fly a spacecraft,” Akira replied easily.

Akechi nodded. He wished the marker was a knife, so he could slit his own throat. This was why he hated being around people. This was why… “So you did what you signed up to do?”

“‘Course.”

“I didn’t,” Akechi said tersely. “I wasn’t told I was fighting. I wasn’t told what I was killing, or for whom. They wanted me to win, and they talked about it like it was a game. They asked me what it would take to win and I didn’t tell them. I didn’t know what I was playing with.”

It was never quiet around people. Akechi could hear Akira’s breathing, the faint beat of his heart. He could hear Akira’s confusion, like a faint buzzing.

“When I came out, they told me I was a hero,” Akechi continued. “I wanted to believe them. But I met the families of some of the soldiers that died. They asked me if it was worth it.”

“Was it?”

“What do you _think_? They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

_I wish I was dead._

Another long not-silence. “I didn’t know that,” Akira said, low and shaky. “They never said.”

Akechi laughed. “How old do you think I am?”

“...Thirty? No, wait—”

“Twenty-seven. Only a year older than you. We won when I was fifteen.”

“How do you know how old I am— _fifteen?_ ”

“I’m a genius, remember?” Akechi laughed again. He would’ve cried if he didn’t. “I want these boxes done, c’mon.”

* * *

Akira talked about other things, after that. He talked about cadet classes and how his friends and adopted dad had banded together to gift him Arsene upon his graduation. His actual father had died a long time ago. For a while, Akira had wanted to be a soldier.

There was nothing else to talk about, Akechi realized. They taught cadets biology and geology and linguistics, but they never _talked_ about those things. Cadets loved space, and flying, and everything else was a distraction. 

Akira talked about space the way Akechi thought about it. The vast unfeeling expanses, rife with danger and obstacle, were home.

He loved being far from the ground.

Akechi hadn’t heard another person talk in years. It was too much to hear and speak at the same time, so he simply listened. Akira’s voice was pleasantly deep, and he had a knack for making anything seem interesting.

* * *

What did it mean to be a killer? Akechi didn’t regret it. He had nothing to regret. He’d been a weapon, and like all good weapons he hadn’t asked too many questions.

 _We can wipe your record clean,_ they’d said. _We can put you on some nice little world and you can find a wife and raise some kids, whatever you like._

 _Really?_ he’d asked. Sixteen, then. Still hopeful.

 _No,_ they said. _We’d love to let you, but there might be other wars._

_I don’t want to fight, though._

_Too fucking bad, kid. The war’s inside you now._

He’d tried to kill himself. They’d sent him to college.

* * *

Arsene had grazed a comet near Treneu. Though the damage to the hull had repaired itself, Akira spent an hour repainting the side.

It really was a beautiful ship.

“I sleep out here sometimes,” Akechi said.

Akira startled. “Out here? On the landing pad?”

“Yes,” Akechi said. He had a feeling he’d be judged for it.

But Akira simply nodded. He hauled himself into Arsene with his painting supplies and emerged a few minutes later holding bedding.

...Oh.

“It’s a nice place to see the stars from, I’ll bet,” he grinned.

Akechi swallowed. His throat was always dry on the surface. It was dry for a different reason, now. “Mostly I watch Selous.”

Akira twitched, glancing at the roiling dark shape in the east. “I guess that’s okay too.”

There was a bizarre and uncomfortable intimacy to eating together. Akechi had avoided it so far, ducking into his bedroom with the breakfast Akira had made and skipping lunch altogether, but they ate dinner on the landing pad and Akira had no shame about watching him.

Akechi felt self-conscious about _everything._ His gloves, the way he held a spoon, the tricks for motor coordination he still used even though he’d had neurosurgery for his dyspraxia at twelve.

(Couldn’t operate the strategy room if he kept tripping over tiles and crashing his fingers through the fragile hovering simulations. In the first few months they’d tried to teach him how anyway. But he was too short, and his hands shook, and more often than not he ended up curled on the floor crying, wondering why he had to play this game if he wasn’t having any fun.)

Akira didn’t call attention to it. They spread their bedding in Arsene’s shadow after dinner, and Akechi leaned back and drank in the sight of Selous. It blocked out the sun.

Long ago, people hadn’t been able to watch eclipses without special gear. But everyone that travelled offworld got that fixed via implants. Akechi’s implants also allowed him to fine-track a simulation. With no simulations around, those implants sometimes gave him headaches.

“Why Selous?” Akira asked. “This place is so…”

“Lonely?” Akechi suggested.

Akira shrugged. “I’m just curious.”

“Selous’ sun used to be bigger,” Akechi said. “It’s been a billion years since, though. Bourne was an actual planet, with water. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but Bourne and Selous both had life. Bourne still has primitive unicellular silicon-based organisms. No photosynthesis, because the sun isn’t bright enough to sustain more than a single layer of that.” He thought about it for a few minutes. “Selous probably has life, too. We know that volcanoes aren’t necessarily a deterrent to that, and Selous didn’t always have such active volcanoes. There are still a few spots where the activity is thin enough that a flyby’s theoretically possible. Bourne’s astrogeologists very rarely have spaceships, though, so we have to rely on evidence from Bourne itself. Selous and Bourne have come close enough for dust from Selous to form strata on Bourne. There’s a canyon on the actual other side of the planet, away from the storm. They wanted to build the station there, but the water reserves are better under here, even with the storm. Also, we wanted to track Selous, and Bourne practically functions as a moon—it travels with Selous for the most part, and the intersections happen when the sun’s gravity warps the orbit. A few million years ago—before the volcanic activity on Selous—the other side of Bourne faced Selous, so it’s actually our most accurate imprint of what Selous’s geology looked like. Of course, the only minerals that formed strata on Bourne were the ones light enough to be blown out of Selous’ atmosphere and heavy enough to embed themselves in Bourne…”

He stopped, going very red. “You should’ve told me to keep quiet,” he muttered.

Akira was smiling. Akechi couldn’t tell if it was a real smile. He’d never been good at reading faces. He wanted to throw up. He hated being around people, because sometimes he couldn’t talk to them and opened his stupid fucking mouth and outed the bag of obsessive crazy he was inside.

“I understood one word in ten,” Akira said. “But you really know what you’re talking about, huh?”

“Of course I do,” Akechi snapped. “This is my _job._ That doesn’t mean I bore you with the details.”

“You didn’t bore me,” Akira said, still in that easy patient voice. Akechi hated him.

“Go to sleep,” he snarled. “We’ve gotta leave early tomorrow.”

Akira hummed, still looking at Selous. Akechi curled up under the heavy blankets and tried to calm down. He named every muscle in his lungs before he remembered how breathing worked, and fell asleep with serrated dust clogging his nose and throat.

* * *

10:30 Selous Time; 10.7.5873

> Initiating system scan…  
>  _Gap in hull located. Initiating automatic recovery.  
> _ _Automatic recovery failed. Manual intervention required._

Akechi checked the lock on his bedroom door five times before bursting into tears.

He _hated_ crying. He hated the overly familiar loss of control in his body. He hated the _wetness_ of it all, and he hated being weak.

In college he’d cried nearly every night. And after that he’d stopped.

Until now, anyway.

He knew why he was crying; he didn’t want to leave Bourne. He didn’t want to return to the war. He’d been born tired and he’d only gotten more so over the years. 

It didn’t help to know this; he’d never known what to say to comfort himself. He didn’t know how comfort felt, so he couldn’t even try reconstructing it from that direction. He thought about hanging himself, rope and beam—it would be easy enough. He’d be comfortable enough when he was dead.

Well, there was some rope in his cupboard…

Well, then.

* * *

Akira’s hands were on his face when he opened his eyes.

“Don’t touch me,” Akechi hissed, scrambling back. His lungs were screaming with the strain, and his body felt like an exposed wire. Every sensation registered over and over again, unavoidable weight of the carpet against his palms and Akira’s worried face in his field of vision and his breath and how he’d left the gloves off, why had he left the gloves off? He didn’t like touching things. He drew his hands between his body and legs, curling over them like something injured.

“Akechi,” Akira said. Had been saying. He reached out, grabbing Akechi’s shoulders. Everything felt like it was happening in slow motion, or to someone else. He saw Akira’s hands on his shoulders, his red fingerless gloves against the white of Akechi’s shirt.

“Don’t touch me,” Akechi repeated. “You should’ve let me die.”

He’d always hated being touched. First as a child, being yanked around by tall men and women in white lab coats with their sugary voices telling him he was _so_ smart, he was going to do _so well_ at the games, while their nails dug into his arm and left bruises.

In college he’d had an unadvisable amount of sex. So many people loved the idea of themselves dating the broken little prince that’d won the war.

They didn’t have the patience to date him, so they’d settled for fucking him, and he’d let them because he loved enduring the unendurable. They’d always touched him like their hands would go right through him.

Akira touched him with intolerable intent. His hands were warm.

Akechi hated this most of all.

“I can’t do that,” Akira said, though he took his hands back. “C’mon, we have to leave.”

“I don’t want to,” Akechi whispered. “Can’t I stay?”

“Would it be so bad?” Akira asked softly. “To be with people again?”

Being personally responsible for the death of a billion people had meant that a significant number of people at the Alliant University of Higher Sciences had hated him. Whether on ideological grounds or personal ones—it didn’t matter. There had been a hate club just for him. They’d beaten him up on campus once.

And then they’d been arrested for it. He hadn’t followed up on the cases. He hadn’t cared about anything except that hospitalization meant he lost an entire term.

“Yes,” Akechi swallowed. “It would be.”

But he followed Akira out of Bourne. He’d made enough of a fool of himself for the day.

* * *

Arsene swept into the sky. Akechi sat on one of the deck chairs, nursing the mug of coffee Akira had made him before they took off and unable to bear the sight of Bourne vanishing under him.

At least the coffee was good. He hadn’t had coffee in years.

“Can you help navigate a ship?” Akira called to him.

Akechi slurped at the coffee. “Made it all the way here by yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Akira said. “But you know Selous better than me.”

Akechi got up and went over to the cockpit. He understood the theory of piloting, and was decently adept himself, but he could never quite empathize with people like Akira, whose fingers flew across the controls with deft assurance. He gripped the back of Akira’s chair with hands that were gloved again, and rattled off everything he knew about atmospheric conditions.

Arsene tilted and flew, silky-quiet under his feet.

“You said there was a spot where the volcanoes are quiet enough for a flyby, right?” Akira asked. Akechi looked at the strip of neck visible between his collar and his curly hair, a pale and vulnerable place.

“Just one, actually,” Akechi replied. “It’s called Taurus Null.”

“Coordinates?”

Akechi closed his eyes, imagining Selous in his mind. “Where do I put it in?”

Akira pointed at the co-pilot’s chair. Akechi sat down, looked at the control board, and took rather longer than he’d have liked to find the number pad. He punched the numbers in, and Arsene’s monitor lit up with the target.

“I’ll take it from here,” Akira said. “View’s on our right.”

The reinforced Kurufin crystal that made up the windows went all around both sides of the ship as well as the front, broken up by the bones of the spacecraft. Akechi pressed his hands against the crystal and peered out, watching stars wheel away around them.

Selous came into view a few seconds later, dominating his field of vision. Up close he could see the breathtaking clouds of volcanic gas that trapped the planet, hydrogen monoxide and helium and sulfur dioxide.

Taurus Null was the size of a small city, a gorgeous wound in the dark dust. Clear red flowed under it like blood, and the edges of the surrounded ash and clouds roiled and licked at it.

Akira swore. “Why’s it like that?”

“I have no idea,” Akechi said. “Don’t go closer, you could lose visibility if one of those volcanoes goes off.”

“This far up?” Akira asked. “Damn. Okay.”

Arsene banked and hovered, and Akechi stared at the pulsing gouge in the atmosphere for a long time. It looked, he thought, almost like a heart.

* * *

19:00 Selous Time; 11.7.5873

The SC Arsene had two bedrooms, which was two more than Akechi had been expecting. Akira’s bedroom door had Featherman stickers on it, a sight which had caught Akechi off-guard when he’d spotted it. He hadn’t seen anything related to Featherman in…decades.

“Are you alright?” Akira had asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He hadn’t left Akechi alone for very long if he could help it. The attempt must’ve spooked him. If Akechi had been thinking like people did he’d have remembered that, and remembered how to stave it off. There was a trick to culling worry. Akechi couldn’t remember what it was. He was too shaken, too raw, to do anything but stare at the door.

Akira had followed Akechi’s eyes to it. “My um, friend put those there. She said it’d cheer the place up, since it’s all so impersonal otherwise. Which Arsene _isn’t,_ but I couldn’t convince her.”

It felt like forever ago that Akechi had woken up early on Saturdays to watch Feather Grey defeat the villain of the week. Oh, the other Feathermen had helped. But Akechi knew Feather Grey was always doing the most.

The memory felt like a fossil. Looking at it, Akechi couldn’t imagine it was evidence of anything real. Just a memory, and not a very trustworthy one at that.

He’d stopped watching Featherman after he’d started playing the war games. There was no room for him in those stories anymore.

“I’ll take the other room,” Akechi had said woodenly.

“Sure, okay,” Akira had said. “I’ll just—let me know if you need anything, alright?”

Akechi had said something vaguely affirmative. He hoped he had, anyway. 

The other room was bland and small. Not quite impersonal—there was a quilted blanket on the bed, and a mug with a handle like a cat’s curled tail in the small attached bathroom. Presumably for toothbrushes. Akechi didn’t bother unpacking, just shoved his bag into the cupboard and sat down on the bed and tried to breathe.

It was no good. He’d become familiar with panic attacks in college, and unfamiliar again later. He placed his head against his knees and let it rage through him, exhausted already by his own pathetic fear and futile rage.

Eventually he’d been left with nothing but muddy sludge for bones and a faint memory that this was usually the time he ate dinner on Selous.

He dragged himself out of the room, padding through the ship. It was small, so much smaller than the station. Akechi could pace through the entire thing in fifteen minutes. A sick bay with a quarantine closet, a storage room, the main deck. Rec room. Kitchenette on the other side of it. Akechi headed for it, trying to focus on the cold white cryalide floor beneath his socks instead of the panic still occupying two-thirds of his lungs.

> _Akira, are you gonna log our passenger?_

Akechi _screamed._

There was a moment where everything felt much closer and much farther away than it should be, and then Akechi blinked and blinked again and realized it was because he’d found himself a wall to stick to. His hands hurt, vaguely, from clenching in his sweater. The floor was so white it was hurting his eyes. He closed them.

Footsteps thudded in a few minutes later. Akechi wanted to snap at Akira not to run, because spacecrafts couldn’t always take that. But that wasn’t even a little bit true.

“Mona, status report?” Akira was saying.

> _We’re all juiced up! Which is good, because it’s boring to just hover around. Let’s get going!_

God. _god,_ just what he needed. Akechi wished he’d told Akira to drop him in fucking Taurus Null, a death that would be horrifyingly painful and yet vastly preferable to _this._ “The ship _talks_?” he croaked, though it rather obviously did.

He was humiliatingly aware of what a sorry figure he probably made, pressed against a wall and unable to think because of an unexpected voice. 

“Yeah,” Akira said belatedly. “The ship talks. Mona, say hi.”

> _Why do I have to talk? Didn’t you introduce me already?_

“Mona’s more personality than usefulness,” Akira continued.

> _Hey!_

“But he manages the ship’s communications, so maybe it isn’t all bad.”

“Extraordinary,” Akechi said faintly. His head was pounding, and he was no longer hungry. He didn’t know why he’d considered eating a good idea at all. He couldn’t have kept it down, anyway. “I’m going to go to bed.”

“Already?” Akira asked, bemused. “It’s like, five p.m.”

“It’s bedtime on Bourne,” Akechi said shortly, and stalked away. The ship’s voice, though faint, carried through the corridors.

> _You should learn something from him._

“Shut up, Mona.”

> _He goes to bed on time._

“I’m going to rip out all your wires, Mona.”

* * *

Akechi was homesick

Apparently Mona—the ship’s _cat_ —only had a voice in the rec room and the kitchenette attached, which was why it had decided to open its mouth just when Akechi got there.

Correction: the rec room, kitchenette, and Akira’s bedroom. Why Akira wanted that damned droid talking to him at all hours of the day was incomprehensible.

He knew he should have eaten something by now. The last thing he’d managed was the coffee Akira had made that morning, but his throat still hurt from the attempt to hang himself and all the panic attacks after. He knew he should’ve gone to that damned knot-making workshop the college had held that one time.

But he knew why he hadn’t; people and him didn’t get along.

It was why he’d gone to Bourne in the first place. To get _away_ from people. Bourne hadn’t had any people at all, just rocks and dust and the storm outside.

Therefore, he was homeless.

 _Homesick,_ Akechi thought. Not homeless. He’d been homeless for years and years. He felt very cold, suddenly, and crawled into the bed. It was more comfortable than his bed on Bourne had been, and the quilt was warm, and it was terrible. Akechi didn’t want to be comfortable right now. It made the rabbit-like hammering of his heart all the more incongruous, and therefore upsetting. He wished he were asleep on the landing pad instead, watching the sky with his lungs full of dust.

He’d hardly ever been able to breathe on Bourne. He wanted to be back there so badly his lungs hurt anyway, a phantom ache like his body could reassure him with a ghost of the real thing.

* * *

06:00 Selous Time; 12.7.5873

Bourne hadn’t been quiet—the storm outside, the faint rumble of the planet itself, the workings of the space station. It _had_ been quiet compared to Arsene, though. In Arsene, machinery hummed at every hour of the day, and there was no respite from the sound.

Akechi couldn’t sleep. He’d tried, tired of his mind, but it was all too _loud._

Thus—

“Do you have to pace?” Akira asked.

Akechi turned on his heel and walked back down the corridor. It was 16 feet, 192 inches, 43.6363636364 cubites by the Alliantic Standard Measurement Index.

“It’s the _middle of the night,_ ” Akira said, a few minutes later.

“So?” Akechi said crisply. “Go to bed.”

Akira made a sound. He was wearing a t-shirt and pyjamas instead of the dark jeans and…different t-shirt he’d been wearing earlier in the day. Akechi walked up the corridor again. He didn’t look into Akira’s bedroom, but he saw it out of the corner of his eye. It was dark inside, and there were what looked like sticker stars on one wall.

Eventually Akira leaned against the side of the doorway, just watching. This was worse. This was much worse, and Akechi had absolutely no corner to back off into.

“How long do you plan to do this?” Akira asked, about seven and a half minutes later.

Numbers, Akechi thought. He really disliked numbers. It was why he was so good at seeing the patterns in them. All the better to miss the trees with. “Until I’m tired enough to sleep.”

Akira yawned. “That’s cool. Does it usually work? The pacing?”

“Hasn’t in thirteen years,” Akechi said promptly. “But it might.”

“Okay,” Akira said, and yawned again. “Do you want a sandwich?”

* * *

Concepts like _up_ and _down_ fell apart in open space. Few people realized this. Pilots knew it because they had to. Akechi was born knowing. As a child, he’d learnt to swim, and then he’d spent hours in the water convincing himself that the stairs were _up._

One could get used to anything, really (even the noise of a spaceship). Making right and left mean up and down had only been the start. Akechi had gone on to convince himself he didn’t know what they were doing. He’d convinced himself he’d see his mother again. He’d convinced himself he didn’t regret it, and he didn’t.

He no longer knew what he believed and what he didn’t. So he fell through every wall. No amount of lying could save him, though. 

Like a drowning man, he never reached the surface.

* * *

“I’m not a picky eater,” Akechi said stiffly. “I just don’t like eating.”

Akira played video games when he wasn’t piloting. He ate when he wasn’t doing either of those. He ate a lot, and made a lot of food. Arsene had a greater variety in storage than Akechi had consumed in college.

“You ate that sandwich fine,” Akira noted.

“Out of sheer desperation,” Akechi snorted.

Not that Akira wasn’t a good cook—there was little he wasn’t good at where the ship was concerned—but that Akechi had a sense for how this went. He scheduled his mealtimes and ate the same thing every day with rare, carefully planned breaks in the routine, and he managed fine. He drifted off his set path, and fell apart.

College had been an awfully thorough object lesson in every way Akechi could fuck up taking care of himself.

“You can manage some curry,” Akira said. “You don’t have to finish it.”

Akechi could not manage the curry. He gave up and exiled himself to the control room, leaning against the Kurufin crystal windows. Darkness spun below him, slow and inexorable. There was no thought more comforting than the constant inevitability of space. How it’d swallow up all their achievements someday, and leave no trace behind.

He imagined the ship falling towards its destination. The way gravity could pull the most determined crafts off-course. His head ached. 

The glass was cool against his forehead. He stayed for a long time.

* * *

11:13 Selous Time; 13.7.5873

“Do all ships require so much maintenance, or is Arsene special?” Akechi asked idly.

Akira had unscrewed a panel in the cryalide and was sitting cross-legged next to the exposed machinery, holding a welding torch in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other. He was fiddling with a couple of gears and some tape. “I don’t let anyone else work on Arsene,” Akira said distractedly. “I did one time, and I got stranded out near Reuv-67.”

“A terrible place to get stuck,” Akechi said dryly. “However did you find your way out?”

“Hitchhiked,” Akira said vaguely.

“And Arsene?”

“They sent a towcraft.” Akira scowled and turned the blowtorch to a higher setting. The crackling whine of electric fire filled the air.

He was doing something complicated with the tongs in his other hand, trying to pry something out of the machinery by…melting through it? Akechi hadn’t an earthly clue what the intention of this activity was. He didn’t seem to be having fun, either.

Akechi had done some mechanical work on Bourne, but rarely anything of this calibre. He doubted Bourne even had welding torches. It was a good thing he’d never needed one.

“What are you actually doing?” Akechi asked suddenly.

The blowtorch flicked off. “Oh, nothing much. The engine sounded a little off, so I decided to see what’s up.”

“See what’s up,” Akechi said slowly. “With a _blowtorch_?”

“How much physics do you know?”

“Enough.”

Akira laughed. “I guess this is more like materials science, anyway. Engine reaction oozes this weird scale shit everywhere. I can get it cleaned at servicing when we dock, but if I wanna check up on the engine I gotta melt through the rusted shit first.”

Akechi blinked. All of that for an engine that sounded a little off?

“Ah-ha!” Akira crowed. “So that’s what it was.”

“What was it?” Akechi inquired.

Akira was grinning crookedly to himself, a surprisingly charming expression. “Clogged fuel nozzle. I can clean that right up.” He tugged it free and staggered to his feet, stretching. “Hey, pass me that box behind you?”

The box was passed. Akechi watched him clean the nozzle and replace it, and then scrape all the scale out of that area of the engine and drop it into a quickly-retrieved dustpan.

It was well past lunchtime by the time he was done. Akira startled when he noticed the time. “How’d you feel about instant noodles?”

“I haven’t had them in a few years,” Akechi said indifferently. He was staring at the grime on Akira’s wrists and along the backs of his thumbs.

“Instant noodles it is,” Akira answered.

* * *

26:40 Selous Time; 13.7.5873

The turbulence had calmed down by the time Akechi found Akira in the rec room. He’d looked on the main deck first and found the lights still warm like they’d only recently been turned off.

Akira was playing video games with frantically fast jerks of his hands, less like a seasoned pilot and more like a thirteen year old streaming live. Akechi leaned against the door and watched, head distantly pounding. He’d tried to sleep and failed, and though the journey inside Arsene was always obscenely smooth, it was clear that there was some unforecasted turbulence going on. He’d stumbled over the threshold of his room on the way out here.

And then Akira, in the rec room, a violent FPS playing up on the enormous screen. Akechi watched it impassively, noted the uncomfortable realism of it, and considered abstractedly that monsters Akira was killing had been modelled off of the Shadows. They had that twisted, scuttling movement down pat, but they hadn’t quite captured the faces.

Shadows didn’t look that scary, was the thing. If Akechi remembered his cultural history right, there had been a shift a few hundred years ago to a clear boundary between unacceptable and acceptable targets of fictional violence. People were out of the question. Shadows and aliens and genetically modified animals were fair game. Funny, considering that intrahuman wars still raged on some of the inner planets, but that had never been Akechi’s business.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Akira said suddenly, without looking up from the screen. “Come inside, will you? You’re creeping me out standing there.”

“Tell your cat to keep quiet,” Akechi said evenly.

Akira laughed. “Mona, down.”

A faint hum switched off. Akechi stepped inside carefully, but no voice spoke up.

“You’re not scared of him, are you?” Akira asked.

Akechi shrugged. He wasn’t scared. He just didn’t like disembodied voices.

“I like Mona,” Akira said softly. He sounded like he was confessing something. People didn’t confess things to Akechi—nobody ever had, in fact, in his entire life. He didn’t attract that kind of trust. “He’s like…”

He didn’t go on, presumably having come to his senses. But Akechi was curious now.

“Not all ships of Arsene’s calibre have cats, right?”

Akira pointed the controller at the screen and the game switched to a screensaver. “No,” Akira said slowly. “He was a gift. From my grandad. There’s a little drive for him, I can plug him anywhere I go and he’s right there. Like a friend.” Akira sounded wistful near the end.

It was a curious thing, to feel—connected to another person. Was this connection at all? Or was Akechi just so starved of it that he’d see it anywhere?

Not connection, he decided. He’d never had a friend.

“It must get lonely,” Akechi said carefully. He didn’t know how far off the mark he was. He knew nearly nothing about Akira, except the reality and presence of him. “Piloting alone.”

“It does, kinda,” Akira replied. “I don’t mind, I guess. I like people and I love my friends but _flying_ ,” he gestured around them with the controller he was still holding. “It’s something else, don’t you think?”

Akechi had never given that much thought to spacecrafts or interstellar travel. But he remembered the suspended, cold wonder of hovering above Taurus Null. Was it like that?

Maybe travelling was different. Taurus Null was just one point. The universe was all space, falling away from them in every direction at once. Frighteningly lonely and cruel and apathetic and therefore more like home than any place Akechi had ever found.

Until Bourne.

“I agree,” he said, a long time later.

“Maybe it’s ‘cause I spent longer than most people flying,” Akira murmured, almost to himself.

“How long?” Akechi asked impulsively.

Akira flashed him a grin, briefly bitter. “Fifteen years, give or take.”

Akechi sat down on the arm of the couch. “Were you born on a spacecraft?”

He wouldn’t have admitted to curiosity if pressed, but it had been a long time since he encountered a mystery.

“No—no, not like that.” Akira laughed mirthlessly. “My parents were divorced. They lived a few light years apart, my dad in some backwater planet and my mom closer to the centre of the galaxy. They had split custody, so every month I’d make the trip from one planet to another. At some point I realized I liked leaving better than I liked arriving, and I liked travelling most of all.” He paused. There was an ugly darkness in his grey eyes, like looking out of a window to find starless space. “Are you sure you wanna hear the rest of this?”

“Yes,” Akechi said unhesitatingly. They hadn’t gotten to the good part of the story yet.

Akira sighed. “I guess you can handle it,” he mumbled grudgingly, and Akechi wondered who else Akira had told that couldn’t handle it. “One time, my mom booked the wrong kind of spacecraft. The kind that didn’t do FTL.”

“Didn’t know they still ran those three decades ago,” Akechi said. It was an approximate guess, but he seemed to have hit the mark by the look of surprise on Akira’s face.

“They still run them, in some parts of the galaxy,” Akira replied dully. “It was a twelve-hour journey at most, I guess. I slept through half of it and spent the other half learning how to play cards from this lady on deck. I had a cheese-and-egg sandwich and I’d forgotten my water bottle at school. I was gonna call a friend and tell her to leave it home when I landed.”

He stopped. Akechi could’ve filled in the gaps himself, if not for what came after. 

Akira had stepped out—how old would he have been? Not that old, if his parents still booked his tickets for him. He’d have stepped off a craft fifteen years later, a decade and a half younger than what he was meant to be. Unmoored in time.

“Turned out my dad was dead,” Akira said. He sounded very far away. “He’d died a few years back. My mom had married and moved out of the city. I didn’t manage to find her for months, and when I did she didn’t remember who I was. Why would she? She had two kids, now.”

 _My mother forgot too,_ Akechi thought. He didn’t say it. He didn’t know if it was true.

“I was on the streets for a while. Then I got too reckless stealing stuff, and I got caught, and the judge was nice enough to send me to military school instead of prison. Not that I had much of a choice, but—” he laughed, a brittle and broken sound. “That war ended before I finished at battle school.”

Akechi didn’t say anything. There was nothing he wanted to say. He couldn’t rid himself of the image of a younger Akira stepping off a spacecraft into a new world.

Faintly visible under that image was a child stepping out of a war game into a world decimated by his orchestration. But that boy hadn’t survived.

Akira had.

“That’s me,” Akira finished. “Neat story, isn’t it? I could sell rights to the movie, but someone’s probably made it a few dozen times before I was born.” He sounded nervous now, and Akechi couldn’t tell why. He couldn’t remember how to be a person, so he stared at the edge of the room, where the cryalide wall met the carpeted floor. 

“It’s a neat story,” he agreed quietly. “Can I ask you something?”

Akira breathed a soft laugh, like he was relieved. “Go on.”

“What would you rather lose: a billion people or fifteen years?”

“That’s not a fair comparison,” Akira said at once. “Those’re nowhere near the same thing.”

“That’s why it’s so hard,” Akechi pointed out, amused. “It’s the choice you have, though. One or the other.”

Akira was fiddling with the controller. Akechi could hear the faint _click_ of buttons being pushed. “Would it be terribly selfish of me if I said I’d rather lose the people?” He sounded guilty even as he said it, like he was sure he was making the wrong choice or that someone was going to make his words have consequences any second now.

Akechi wasn’t interested in consequences for once. He laughed. “And I’d want to lose fifteen years,” he said, still smiling. “I guess that makes us even.”

“Even for what?”

He couldn’t laugh anymore. “If you hadn’t gotten on that spacecraft you’d have been a soldier a lot earlier. They conscripted everyone. You’d be dead by now. _No_ one survived it. No one but _me_.”

“That doesn’t seem like even, still,” Akira observed. “We might never have met. Feels like fate.” He raised a hand in a fist, and Akechi stared at it for a second waiting for the punch. It never came. “I’d trade you, though.”

Akechi raised his hand and tentatively bumped the backs of his fingers against Akira’s. “I wouldn’t,” he replied. “Like you said, it’s not a fair trade.”

“Must be hell inside your head,” Akira commented. The moment faded, already forever ago. “Wanna play a game with me?”

 _No,_ Akechi thought. _I don’t like games._

But he nodded, and sat still while Akira retrieved the controller.

It turned out he was rusty and the controls were jankier than he was used to. He got the hang of it fairly fast, though, and then proceeded to trounce Akira in round after round, each time letting Akira get closer to victory before destroying him.

It was easier if he didn’t think. He’d never played games like this. The war games had been all strategy and aerial views of stellar systems, floating models and numbers.

This was a lot of colorful blood on the screen, and dropped treasures, and Akira insisting on switching to collaborative mode so they could wander around a palace with levels while Akira ran up to every shiny thing on the screen and smashed it to bits and Akechi set up elaborate attacks to kill Shadows.

This was _fun._

* * *

Near the end of the war games, Akechi had been bored.

It _was_ boring. Day after day of white walls and white floors and enormous rooms flanked with pale men and women in starched lab coats, holding tablets and drinking out of thermoses of tea or milk or vodka. Day after day of that damned chair that was, even five years in, too big for him. They always thought the war would end sooner rather than later, and they never wanted to buy a chair that was the right size when he’d only grow out of it in a few years.

In the first couple of years, Akechi had required cushions to let him reach up high enough to see the bottom of the simulation. By the time he was fifteen, he worked standing.

They’d started teaching him combat when he was twelve. He’d learnt everything they were willing to teach him about it in a year. It would take a lifetime to master it, but Akechi didn’t have a lifetime. He had the body of a child and the mind of a military genius and—

And he’d be dead when the war ended.

No one said it, but they knew. That was the cost of putting a child at the head of an army and teaching him that every breath and moment of his life was a means to winning.

In hindsight, he should’ve tried harder to die.

* * *

He’d still been a child, then. A bad one, sure, too smart and too sharp, but a _child._ He’d wanted his mother. They’d told him he could see her after the war.

After the war they told him she was dead.

He’d only learnt years later that she’d still been alive. They’d just wiped her mind of him. They’d had to—she’d thought she was giving her son up to be a hero, not a murderer.

What was the difference? Where was the line?

* * *

03:04 Selous Time; 14.7.5873

Akechi woke up with a scream lodged in his throat.

He shouldn’t have played that stupid fucking video game with Akira. _Fun,_ honestly. Who cared about fun? The balance of Akechi’s mind was fragile enough without tossing in conversations that made him feel like a person and war games, war games all over fucking again. He’d never be rid of those stupid games.

What if he’d actually killed someone with them this time too? Who’d sent Akira, anyway? Alliantic Federation’s ground control, those fuckers that couldn’t be trusted any more than Earth could. What if Akira had tricked him into playing those games (it hadn’t been a very good trick) (Akechi had fallen for it anyway) (some illusion of connection that he kept grasping for, so stupid and so _futile_ what the fuck was all that genius _for_ where did it go—) to test him?

Why did they want him back?

He knew the answer even as he thought the question. Long before.

Another war. The Shadows again, though he was supposed to have wiped them out. Or a new species of alien. Or other humans.

 _Not again,_ he thought. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. In the morning there would be another day of war and he wished, so badly, he was dead. Just so he wouldn’t have to live with himself.

* * *

10:15 Selous Time; 14.7.5873

Akira smiled at him over breakfast. Akechi picked at his food, contemplated the trivial details of starvation, and considered how best to frame his question.

In the end he settled for a blunt knife. All the better to ruin both of them, though he didn’t know if Akira could be ruined. He felt guilt, hypothetically, but in practice cruelty came easily to people and easiest of all when Akechi was in the equation. He’d given up on pitying himself for it. There were good reasons.

Nevertheless. He was a rather spiteful creature at the most inconvenient times.

“What do they plan to do with me?”

Akira stopped smiling. 

“War?” Akechi asked, smiling in his stead. He didn’t feel whatever people were supposed to feel when they smiled. “Just twelve years after the last?”

Now Akira looked ashamed.

Akechi felt numb. He poked at his eggs, but they were just yellow lumps without meaning. Numb and sick and used up. Maybe killers didn’t get to feel this way, but Akechi didn’t have a choice. He never had, really.

“You should’ve left me dead on Bourne,” Akechi said, low and exhausted.

“You know I couldn’t,” Akira said at once.

“Because you have a mission,” Akechi filled in. “To bring me back to them.”

Akira looked tense, like a cat cornered. “It would’ve been _wrong_ to leave you,” he hissed. “I’d be a bad person if I did.”

“So what does that make me?” Akechi asked, idly curious.

“We’ve already established that, haven’t we? Exhaustively—”

Akechi held up a hand, tired of this already. “Save it. Wrong or not, if I can live with having killed a billion people, you can live with having killed one. For his own good, and by choice. But maybe you _like_ coaxing people into traps, in which case you’ve been my guest already.”

“I don’t _like it!_ ” Akira shouted. “And it’s not a _war_ , since you’re so bent on that. It’s _not_.”

“You’re doing it, whether you like it or not,” Akechi told him, neutral even as Akira’s knuckles went white with rage. “And if it’s not a war now, it will be eventually. And I’ll have to be there _all over again,_ instead of living out my life on Bourne or being _dead_.”

Akira pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It’s a special program,” he mumbled. “ _Persona._ They want to make teams, and they want to put you in mine.”

“Teams that fight, obviously.”

“For the greater good,” Akira muttered.

Akechi threw the plate of eggs at him. He didn’t duck in time, and sputtered for a few minutes with scrambled egg splattered over his face and clothes.

“Fucker,” Akira gasped. “You _fucker._ ”

“Never say _for the greater good_ again,” Akechi snarled, over Akira’s continued swearing. “It _never_ means what you think it means. There are no greater goods or lesser evils, only lies we tell to make our crimes bearable. But the guilt never stops, and if it does _you’re doing it wrong._ ”

“Akechi,” Akira started. He _did_ look guilty now. It didn’t help. Nothing helped, and Akechi’s hands were shaking. He’d killed too many people to yell at someone else about _morals._

A hypocrite, in the end. If he hadn’t stopped fighting he’d have learnt to say _for the greater good_ more convincingly than Akira ever would.

“You should’ve let me die,” Akechi said.

He didn’t wait for Akira’s response, only walked away. The ship was small, but his room had a lock. He collapsed between the door and the bed and tried to talk himself into bashing his head open against a wall.

Too painful, though. The injuries if he failed would render him useless, and therefore helpless.

Not only a hypocrite but also a coward, Akechi thought, and gnawed at his fingers until he passed out.

* * *

The war wasn’t Akira’s fault.

Not the one in the real world, and not the one in his head that he pretended wasn’t raging every minute of the day.

_I’m tired, mama._

* * *

In a life starved of connection, the moments where he acquired it stood out like lighthouses. 

His mother had taken the week before she sent him away off work, and they’d spent every day outside. Wandering down the edge of the creek, hand in hand. Her soft, off-key singing, or his endless chatter that was mostly the regurgitated contents of the encyclopedia on soil formation he’d read, and sometimes in silence.

In one place, the creek widened to a little stream.

Akechi remembered the sunshine in the water, the way light bent and danced. He remembered the sound of birds and rustling leaves. Mostly, though, he remembered looking up at his mother and seeing the tears running down her cheeks. 

“Doesn’t it look lovely, Goro?” she’d asked, choked up.

He hadn’t known what to say. He’d have given everything for her to stop crying, aware in some way that it was his fault just like the men in plain suits and white coats that had arrived a month earlier had been his fault, aware that everything that had ever gone wrong in her life was on him. He’d wanted to help, and he only ever broke it more.

And he’d remembered how it looked beautiful even with her crying next to him. He remembered hating himself for wanting to live in the world when he couldn’t justify the sadness he caused to the one person he loved.

“It looks wonderful, mama,” he’d agreed, and squeezed her clammy hand.

* * *

And then no more memories of her, forever.

* * *

19:27 Selous Time; 15.7.5873

“Do you have a medical kit?” Akechi asked. “I seem to be running a mild fever.”

Akira was piloting today. It was an elegant, focused activity, and despite knowing that the ship was doing enough work that Akira could afford to look away for a few seconds, Akechi found himself hoping his attempt at distraction would crash them into a catastrophically placed piece of space dust.

No luck. “Kitchen, top shelf,” Akira said. “Why do you have a fever?”

Akechi walked away without replying. He didn’t let himself dither on the last step before the kitchen, but he couldn’t hold back a wince as Mona’s voice grated over the speakers.

> _Have you been avoiding me? Don’t think I didn’t notice!_

Akechi headed right for the top shelf, rifling through it until he found a box of approximately the right shape and size. All the strips and tubes and boxes in it were sealed, as though Akira didn’t get sick often.

> _Hey, has anyone told you it’s rude to ignore people?_

He shut the box and carried it back to his room.

* * *

Akira knocked an hour later, just as the precitaphinol was starting to kick in. Akechi’s head felt pleasantly fuzzy, his awareness of the world cushioned for once by something that didn’t hurt. “Come in,” he called.

“Having fun?” Akira asked. “How much did you take?”

Akechi held up three fingers. “Anything less doesn’t do much,” he said ruefully. “Oh, and a Tribulon to chase it down.”

Akira was sitting on the edge of the bed now. When had that happened? It wasn’t wide enough for two, but Akechi tried instinctively to move away and then gave it up as hopeless. Akira’s hip pressed against Akechi’s side, and he couldn’t stop thinking about that. Every sensation narrowed to that one point of contact. _Like a wormhole,_ Akechi thought nonsensically. Wormholes weren’t real, but he’d learnt all about them in his History of Astronomy class.

“Can I touch your hair?” Akechi asked aimlessly into the silence.

“Sure,” Akira said. “Did you actually have a fever, or did you just wanna get high?”

Akechi considered this carefully. “Yeah,” he said finally, and raised a hand to touch one of Akira’s curls. It was rougher than he’d expected, the hair crisp and wiry and pleasantly textured against Akechi’s bare fingers.

He closed his eyes and thought, _wormhole._ The thought spiralled off and expanded, a sensory cocktail formed of curls around his fingers and warmth against his side and a ravenous expanse inside him, all of it magnified and reflected and large enough to fall through unseen and unheard. Or maybe it was rising, like bubbles in water. Like sunlight that danced in water, that shimmered on the surface of the bubbles and bounced around their insides. Anchorless and free.

“You’re almost pleasant when you’re high,” Akira noted, warm and amused.

Akechi yanked at his hair, and then regretfully took his hand back. “It’ll pass, don’t worry,” he said shortly. The cloud he’d found was dissipating already, his mind working overtime to make up for the brief lapse in anxiety. “You can leave.”

Akira left. He took the medical kit with him.

* * *

Akechi was used to surviving on fumes. He’d gotten quite good at it. He’d never made friends in college (being beaten up the one time he tried left a mark in more ways than one) and he’d never really wanted to. They couldn’t understand what he’d gone through, and he resented them for it.

He never thought about other people if he could help it. But when he felt so little and thought so much, the moments where feeling overtook thought were indelible in his mind.

Maybe it was the comedown making him cold and anxious, his body thrumming with pain he hadn’t felt in years. The memory rushed through his head in frantically full colour, determined to ruin the thin peace he’d almost found.

In the memory, Akechi was lying on the ground. Pain made thought impossible and breathing difficult; every attempt to drag air into his lungs was met with resistance from his body.

He still tried. He wasn’t going to die on the whim of a club of people with no purpose other than to hate him. He had more dignity than that, though not by much. Enough dignity to not try to beg any of them for help, to keep his screams wordless and his body still.

And then he was looking up, blinking blood and sweat out of his eyelashes and staring into the face of one of his attackers. The raw loathing there surprised him.

What surprised Akechi more was how intimately familiar the expression was.

“Do you even remember their names?” the man asked. His voice echoed through the pain and shock; it took Akechi a long time to understand what he was being asked.

And then he laughed, because it was funny. Because it wouldn’t have made either of them feel better if Akechi _did_ remember. A crime was a crime; repentance was futile. If he died here, it wouldn’t be because he’d earned it.

“Fuck you,” the man hissed. “You’re just _filth_.”

 _You too,_ Akechi mouthed. 

And then he passed out

* * *

In the staticky nightmares of the hangover, the man’s face had grey eyes and he was trying to help Akechi up, only he’d beaten Akechi too and now Akechi refused to take his help. _Let me die,_ Akechi kept trying to say, but he’d been strangled and his voice wouldn’t work.

 _You’re not dying,_ the man kept saying. _You haven’t earned it yet._

* * *

05:06 Selous Time; 17.7.5873

“Awake already?” Akira asked. He was awake too, lying on his stomach and fiddling with a corner of the ship. 

“I don’t want to be,” Akechi said sourly. “The hangover is terrible.”

“I can make you coffee after I’m done here,” Akira murmured. It didn’t feel like some special kindness—Akira sounded like he’d have offered this to anyone.

Akechi shrugged, though Akira couldn’t see him. “Won’t help.”

“Oh.” The soft sound of metal against metal filled the air. Akechi sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands and hated every minute of the aftermath. “You’re not an addict, are you?” Akira asked suddenly.

“No,” Akechi sighed. “I have an implant that prevents addiction. And another that makes me unresponsive to most recreational drugs.”

“Figures,” Akira said. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting high on precitaphinol and Tribulon.” 

Sometimes the invasions caught up to him, not the acts themselves but the awareness of them that he could only stave off most of the time. In the stark bitterness of the hangover, the awareness cut jagged edges between what was him and what wasn’t.

The fact was that precious little of _him_ remained. The boy he’d started out as, that could trip over a stable and flat surface and loved his mother. He’d been ripped up and reshaped into something _useful_ , and he hated that he’d allowed himself to be made into a tool. He hated that being a tool meant he’d never be a person.

No one had ever asked him what _he_ wanted to be. He still didn’t know the answer, but he resented not having a choice.

He resented it so much he’d have killed himself just to spite all their work.

Too fucking bad the implants delayed death on top of everything else. All the times in his life when he’d come _so fucking close,_ only to be thwarted and kept alive against his will. Again and again and _fucking again._

“I had to experiment a lot before I figured that out,” Akechi said finally.

Akira laughed. Akechi couldn’t tell what was funny.

* * *

The war. Akira. The war.

No matter which way Akechi put the pieces together, the results were the same. 

A war would be bigger than the two of them. There _was_ no ‘two of them’—that part Akechi had built up in his head, a scarecrow scaffolded with wishful thinking and stuffed with desire. A war would be too big for him to pull Akira out unscathed a second time, when Akechi wasn’t sure why he was considering fighting in the first place. 

Surely better to go to one’s fate willingly—or was that just how Akechi had been raised, the path he thought himself too old to deviate from?

A hundred times in two days he thought about the words he’d use to convince Akira to turn back, run away. _Take me back to Bourne. Take me back to the planet I was born on. Take me to the planet you were born on. Strand us near a black hole, so that time goes by faster for those outside and the world will have forgotten us long before we run out of boxed noodles._

Here he cut himself off. Akechi didn’t get to be loved, but he _certainly_ didn’t get to love anyone else. Least of all Akira.

Akira, whose only crime so far was being assigned to be genocidal war hero Goro Akechi’s pilot.

Which left Akechi to contemplate death. 

* * *

Time blurred. He tried to catch it, but his mind wasn’t up to the task.

He counted the seconds and fell asleep and woke up unable to remember where he’d stopped. The lapses in his memory should’ve frightened him— _did_ frighten him—but he couldn’t bring himself to care. So he’d be useless to them, big fucking deal.

Sometimes he saw Akira. More often than not he hid out in his room, only coming out once in a while to refill his bottle of water or grab a packet of space peanuts from the kitchen.

Akira talked to him. Akechi didn’t talk back, and Akira stopped trying.

He came back every few hours, like he was afraid Akechi would be gone if he turned away. Akechi looked back at him, trying to remember what he was supposed to be feeling about Akira, or any of this. 

Grief had a way of fucking with his head. It already felt like he’d been on this spaceship forever, and _would_ be on this spaceship forever. Eleven days shouldn’t have felt like such an eternity. 

Akechi didn’t sleep, but he dreamed. He dreamed of axes arcing down on his body, hacking it to pieces. He dreamed of the crush of sweat and blood and body. He dreamed of pain so large it didn’t hurt, because there was nothing to hurt with.

* * *

21:09 Selous Time; 21.7.5873

“ _Fuck!_ ”

The shout was so loud it rang through the spaceship, through the door Akechi had left open a crack to let some air in. Not that air was helping him right now.

He would have ignored it. He _wanted_ to ignore it. But he was getting sick of being trapped in his head and he didn’t know how long it had been since he’d so much as attempted to acquire a glass of water for himself.

Akira had come in a few hours earlier to try to convince him to eat. Akechi had ignored him then, but he’d almost spoken, almost apologized.

How silly to apologize now, after everything. His mother had told him that apologies without intent to change were meaningless, and Akechi did not intend to change. There was nowhere for him to go where he’d be wanted, nothing he could become that was useful.

The self-pity in that thought disgusted him enough that he dragged himself to his feet, stumbling on bloodless legs to the source of the shout.

Akira, of course. He was in the pilot’s cockpit, leaning over the control panel with his head in his hands. Akechi cast his eyes at the screen, then at the sky outside. No turbulence, no anomalies. Whatever was wrong was beyond Akechi’s calibre to identify at a glance.

It took him a moment, looking around and then at Akira, to realize what that trembling hunch in Akira’s shoulders meant.

Shit, this was _not_ something Akechi knew how to deal with.

There was no one else, though, so he cautiously approached Akira from the side. “Akira?” he asked tentatively.

Akira looked up. There was a bright sheen to his eyes behind the glasses, and his face was blotchily red. Akechi hadn’t realized Akira could look anything other than painfully handsome. It was almost a welcome change.

Then he began laughing, a hysterical hyena cackle that made Akechi jerk and step back.

“What’s wrong with you,” he said flatly.

Akira could not seem to hold in his laughter; he’d doubled up with it, tearing off his glasses and throwing them down like he didn’t care if they snapped. “Nothing,” he gasped.

“Clearly not _nothing,_ ” Akechi said sourly, bending down to pick up the glasses.

“Yeah,” Akira said. He grinned, too-wide and twisted. “No shit.”

“Are you going to tell me?” Akechi demanded, running out of patience.

Akira turned back to the control panel, pushing at a couple of buttons and typing in a command. He swung his chair around to face Akechi and then kept spinning, ridiculously childish and terrifying with it. Akechi hadn’t actually spoken to a child in several decades; he’d forgotten how frightening and erratic their behavior could be— _had_ been to him, even as a child himself.

“Akira?”

The smile slipped off Akira’s face. Its absence was better, but not by much. “They’re,” he started, and then put his face in his hands again.

Akechi reached out in a burst of annoyance—at his own unease, at Akira’s actions—and poked at Akira’s forehead until he peeked out from between his fingers. “Just get it out,” he said, though that was terrible advice.

“They’re,” Akira swallowed, then visibly forced himself to continue. “They’re taking Arsene away.” His voice had gone cold, and there was a dark, broken look in his eyes like it was only now sinking in.

For a moment Akechi couldn’t think. Then he began to laugh too.

“It’s _not_ funny,” Akira said, lips twitching.

Akechi threw Akira’s glasses back at him. They thumped against his chest and landed in his lap. “It’s fucking hilarious,” he said, though it really, really wasn’t.

He couldn’t laugh after that, though he couldn’t find anything else to say either. He wanted to offer to put Akira out of his misery. He wanted to offer to put both of them out of their misery. But he knew there was no way out, and their wardens would not be bargained with.

“I should’ve let you stay on Bourne,” Akira mused.

Akechi shook his head. “They’d just have sent someone else. I could be dead, and they’d try to collect the corpse.”

“Should’ve thrown you in that fucking volcano, then.”

“Yeah,” Akechi smiled. “You can’t just turn this ship around, I presume.”

“Ground control override,” Akira said. “I thought about it already.”

“Fucking fascists.”

Akira smiled too, sad and real. “What does that make us?”

“Tools.” Akechi held up a fist.

It took him a moment, like it had taken Akechi a moment the first time. Then he raised his own own hand and bumped it against Akechi’s.

* * *

Akechi had made his last rounds of Bourne alone. He wanted to allow Akira the same courtesy, but Akira kept glancing back at him and then snatching his eyes away like he didn’t know how to ask, and Akechi didn’t understand but he followed Akira anyway.

They didn’t talk. There was nothing to say, and Akira wasn’t a particularly verbose person anyway.

He trailed the tips of his fingers over the walls. Akechi stepped out of the way where necessary.

Two bedrooms. Cockpit. Storage areas, above and below. The small airlock by the door, where Akira clenched the doorway so hard Akechi thought something had to give.

The rec room. Akira pulled out Mona's drive, pocketing it with a blank expression. Then he turned and threw a fist into the wall.

He was crying silently as he slumped against it, stroking the cryalide with bruised knuckles like he was trying to apologize. Futile, though Akechi could identify the roots of the impulse.

Some places were home. And people could be homes too—but Akechi had never liked that thought. He’d never liked the idea of shackling one’s sense of safety to the wrists of someone who might someday want to walk away from that burden. A person was a person—they couldn’t be _more_ than that. They couldn’t be asked to hold someone else when they were already busy trying to hold themselves.

Besides, one _couldn’t_ love a person like they loved a place. A place didn’t love back, but it gave endlessly of itself, and people had limits.

* * *

People had limits.

* * *

“Of course they waited until the end to tell you,” Akechi said. They were standing in the kitchen now, and Akira was holding a bottle of wine contemplatively.

Akira shook his head. “I was going to fix the grating in the engines,” he said wistfully. “And install some custom shelves in the loft so the cargo wouldn’t slide around so much in turbulence. I was going to get better stabilizers. And an internal gravitic correction system.”

“And I was going to start a dig near the equator on Bourne,” Akechi replied. “Are you going to drink that?”

“No,” Akira said. “I don’t drink in public.” He frowned after he said it, then took a long swig.

Akechi laughed. He’d never laughed as much as he had in the past day. He tugged the bottle out of Akira’s hands, taking a careful sip and then another, larger gulp. That wasn’t how wine was meant to be drunk, but Akechi didn’t care.

“Can you even get drunk?” Akira asked curiously. “With the implants and all?”

“Doesn’t stop me from drinking,” Akechi shrugged. “Although if you have a wire and a battery I can shock it dead for a few hours.”

Akira looked utterly delighted. “You can _do_ that?”

“Only for some of them,” Akechi said, vaguely amused. “But I can get drunk. I just don’t get addicted to it.”

“Oh,” Akira said, seeming disappointed. “You know, I’m not even angry about Arsene?”

Akira held his hand out for the bottle; Akechi considered withholding it, but he gave it back after a moment. “Liar,” he snapped. “And if you’re not a liar, then you’re a spineless idiot.”

Akira tipped his head back to drink. “Spineless idiot, huh.”

Akechi snorted. “Why do you think you aren’t angry?”

The cabinets under the counter thumped as Akira planted a foot against them for balance, then hopped up on the counter itself. “I always thought,” he started. “I always think…that everything I have that’s good and worth having is temporary. That nothing lasts.”

“Which is true,” Akechi acknowledged. Everything he'd loved had been taken from him, methodically and totally. When he thought he was beyond that mistake, he made it again.

And each time he was punished for it, as Akira was being punished.

_Why does it have to be like this?_

“Yeah,” Akira sighed. “Yeah, right? You take what’s good and you run with it.”

“But you didn’t make it far enough this time.” Akechi held his hand out for the bottle and tried not to look at Akira, though he wanted to. 

The surface pressed against his palm, cool even through the glove.

“Neither did you,” Akira pointed out.

“This time,” Akechi repeated. Like they would have another chance.

Akira was smiling when Akechi looked up at him. “Maybe next time,” he said sardonically. “Always another day. Speaking of which, we land tomorrow.”

“Bring it on.” Akechi rolled his eyes—too tired and reckless to care—and drank the wine.

* * *

_Limits._

* * *

Akechi was well and truly drunk by the time he crashed into his bed, still laughing. His mind felt pleasantly hazy. He tugged off the gloves absently, holding his hands up to the dim nightlight in the room. The silver tips of his fingers flashed quietly.

Second chances. No choices. Tools once forged that would wield themselves.

 _This isn’t how I want to go,_ he thought drowsily. The thought made no sense, but it was important. He could only hope he’d remember this tomorrow, the revelation blooming inside him like the cloud from a bomb.

* * *

12:00 Selous Time; 22.7.5873

“We land in an hour,” Akira said. “Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” Akechi answered. He felt sick, and it wasn’t just the hangover. This was Akira's last time with Arsene—how could he be so _calm_?

Limits. Second chances.

 _What if—_ he thought, and then couldn’t continue. Not inside his head, so he’d have to say it out loud, even if someone heard him. “What if I choose not to kill?”

Akira looked back and then back at the control panel. “Can you do that?” he asked.

“I couldn’t,” Akechi said. He hated admitting this; it felt like such a _failure,_ his courage not having deserted him in moments of need so much as arriving long after the battle was over. On the good days, like today, he didn’t know what to make of his history. “I couldn’t choose not to when I was a child.”

“Right,” Akira hummed.

“But I’m not a child _anymore,_ ” Akechi continued. “And I don’t care what they do to me. There’s no one alive I love enough that threatening them would work.”

Akira looked up. Akechi looked up too. A surface approached on the screen. They watched in silence as it expanded, filling more and more of the screen. Akechi thought about looking out of the windows to see it grow in real space. Something kept him rooted in place.

“Why now?” Akira asked.

“Because.” Akechi closed his eyes. “There are no second chances. You do something right the first time, or you live with the pain. And I’m tired of thinking I’ll always make the same mistake.”

He realized he’d clenched his hands into fists; that they hurt. He forced them to relax, finger by finger. Akira was still looking at the screen, but Akechi didn’t doubt that he was listening. There was just something about the sight that demanded attention, and somewhere Akechi was glad he could make this confession without Akira’s charcoal eyes on him.

“I’m not going to kill anymore,” Akechi whispered. “I’m done.”

“Yeah,” Akira said, finally turning to Akechi. “You’re done. We both are, I think.” He smiled crookedly; it occurred to Akechi that Akira _was_ still angry—he just hid it better.

But Akechi didn’t know what to do with that, so he turned once more to the screen. Details were becoming clear; architectural landmarks, natural formations. Oceans under the clouds, and mountain ranges piercing through them. A cold and sweet clarity swept over him, unlike anything he’d felt. Victory, for the first time in his life.

* * *

They touched down.

**Author's Note:**

> the quote in the beginning is from [snow and dirty rain](https://poeticfuck.blogspot.com/2008/06/siken-snow-and-dirty-rain.html).


End file.
